What are those rays that come out of headlights at night?
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If you see something, it means a photon has entered your eye and been sensed by the cells on the back wall. You’ll note that the direction photons leave your headlights is almost the exact opposite direction needed for it to enter your eyes. The only way your headlights can show you something is for the photons to strike that thing, reflect off, and come backwards to your eyes. Most of the time, the stuff we see are the road, road lines, road signs, and the occasional animal that wanders out. These are large objects that clearly reflect a lot of light so we get an image from all the different photons that bounce off it. There’s a lot of stuff in the way that is very small. It doesn’t reflect a lot of light, and we don’t get an image from the few photons that bounce off it. These things are so small, we may not even realize we are seeing a thing at all.
It seems like the beams of light emanating from are headlights are physical objects we can see. They aren’t. The beams trace the path that the photons make on their way out of the headlights, but essentially what is happening is like in heist movies where they spray powder or fog in the air so they can see the laser beams protecting the jewels. The particles are so small that they don’t actually obscure vision to a meaningful degree, but large enough to interact with a few stray photons and scatter them. Some will end up in our eyes, and we see what looks like a beam of light.
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